about this site
a short, honest description of what this project does, what it doesn't do, and how it pays for itself.
what it is
AlphaBay.Market is an independent status directory for .onion services. we keep a hand-curated list of tor hidden services - search engines, news mirrors, communication platforms, privacy infrastructure, archives - and probe every address on it automatically through our own tor connection. the badges you see are the output of that probing: nothing scraped from other directories, nothing guessed.
alongside the list, the site runs seventeen free browser tools - pgp key generation, encryption, signature verification, checksums, an onion address validator and a live onion status checker you can run yourself. all of them work client-side where possible so they function even in tor browser's safest mode.
how it's funded - no mystery
there are no free submissions. the only way to get a placement on this list is to pay for one - the details, pricing and terms are on the advertise page. everything else we track is there because we chose to track it. paid placements are exactly that: paid slots. they buy visibility, not a green badge - the checker treats a paying service identically to any other, and a paid listing can go offline like anything else. if that distinction ever stops being true, this paragraph will say so.
what this site is not
- not a marketplace. nothing here is for sale except advertising space on this site itself.
- not affiliated with any listed service. we have no relationship with the services we track - no partnerships, no revenue share, no endorsements in either direction.
- not a trust oracle. our badges measure reachability only: did the server answer through tor during the last automated probe. a green badge says nothing about who operates a service or whether you should use it.
- not anonymous to operate a claim about. this is a small independent project run by people who prefer not to put personal names on it. judge the output, not a team page.
where to look next
- faq - quick answers to common questions about the badges.
- warrant canary - what this project would and would not do under legal pressure.
- tools - the full free tool suite.